Aligning Digital & Business Strategy

In a study conducted by Apigee, they showed that aligned organizations were six times more likely to be able to be a leader in their industry by improving their employee’s experience and portfolio of products and services.

MIT and Capgemini also showed that alignment helps organizations to be 26% more profitable than their industry competitors.

In digital marketing, this disjoint can be more enhanced. Furthermore, the relationship between online and offline marketing is becoming more blurred every day.

It’s impossible to ignore the impact of digital so getting your digital strategy working effectively in line with your business strategy will help your brand grow and prosper.

In order to properly align your business and digital objective, we recommend using the following three-step process:

An investment logic map also provides you with a strategic response to deliver the expected benefits, and the top-level change requirements. Together these two things help you to understand the resource requirements and helps you ensure that the proposed change supports the agreed organizational focus (for differentiation).

Note that the measures are likely to be different but the key performance indicators must be the same.

Digital platforms play a key role in the discovery of small and medium businesses, as well as in consumers’ purchase decision. As consumers turn to digital media for researching products/services, businesses must recognize and embrace this opportunity.

· According to 77% of small and medium enterprises owners, a digital presence helps with customer acquisition.

· About 63% of them stated that a digital presence could also improve the image of the enterprise.

· As of 2016, investing in social media marketing is the intention of about 45% of small and medium business owners for their digital future.

This in turn helps you achieve your overall goals, by knowing which channels generate the highest ROI.

By incorporating a diverse mix of digital marketing platforms into your strategy, you will better enable your business to reach a wider audience that can lead to higher traffic on your site and more sales being generated as a result. By creating a cohesive digital strategy that has a specific target audience in mind, you can reach that audience more effectively via the platforms they prefer to engage with.

Some may prefer Google searches, while others may spend more time on social media sites. To discover which channel will yield the best results, it is important to have a digital marketing strategy that features a strong assortment of digital platforms with a specific goal in mind.

One major advantage a digital strategy can provide is the ability to keep everyone in your company moving in the same direction towards the same set of goals.

Simply looking to generally improve sales or online engagements is too vague. A cohesive digital strategy will enable you to set specific goals and keep track of your progress as you advance towards achieving those goals.

By implementing an integrated digital strategy that includes analytics, you can track changes in your customer’s behavior and use that information to continuously improve your marketing efforts.

It enables you to go back and review what worked and what didn’t, allowing you to optimize the strategy and execution according to the benchmarks you use to track your progress. This approach will always lead to improvement wherever necessary.

Creating an effective digital marketing strategy often requires a significant initial investment which is why a lot of businesses shy away from it at first. What many of these companies are unaware of however, is the fact that a digital strategy isn’t limited to advertising a website alone, and can quickly lead to exponential growth.

A truly effective digital strategy will include a large number of online engagement methods including promotional emails, social media management, SEO, and content generators/bloggers. These are just a few examples of tactics that can be extremely useful when it comes to increasing market share and delivering a strong ROI.

It is typically broken down into five stages:
Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy.

From a measurement point of view, this may map to a variety of sales and marketing channels, from social media and web visits to mailing lists and sales contacts.

2) Reviews are a great way to ensure you are addressing the preferences in the customer journey. All e-commerce companies can benefit from allowing customers to write product and experience reviews because it eliminates any doubts potential customers may have.

3) At the purchase stage of your funnel, you have to think about what would make that customer come back or better yet spread the word. Meaning: how are you building loyalty?

By creating specific digital marketing KPIs, it’s easy to determine targets and goals and measure performance based on those values.

With the help of a KPI dashboard and marketing tools, you can get a comprehensive overview of your marketing performance and make informed decisions to improve your results month-over-month.

1) Lead Generation
2) Website & Traffic Metrics
3) SEO Optimization
4) Revenue
5) Social Media Tracking

– Unique Site Visitors: how many first-time prospects are discovering your website?

– Cost Per Lead: measures the effectiveness of marketing campaigns at generating leads for each dollar spent.

– Web Traffic Sources: measures where your traffic comes from and provides a comparison of major traffic sources such as Search, Direct and Referral.

– Bounce Rate: shows you what percentage of visitors leaves your website before further exploring your website.

– Conversion Rate: average number of conversions per ad click. One of the most important metrics for measuring the profitability of your marketing efforts.

– Click-Through Rate: measures the percentage of people who actually clicked on your ad. It is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (i.e. “impressions”)

– Average Time on Site: how long do prospects stay on your site?